Loss of a Parent

Any of you lose a parent when you were a kid? My own father died when I was eight. I'm now in my fifties, and it was really only a few years ago that I finally began to realize just what an atom bomb it was that had exploded my life apart back then. Old-enough people often talk about what they did during the Sixties, where they were; well, that's where I was--atomized.
Rolling Stone recently ran an interview with Merle Haggard. Turns out his father died when he was nine. Mr. Haggard says he problably would not have gone to prison (he did time in San Quentin) had his dad not died. It's like that. Having a parent die while you're a kid blows your life completely part. Very few calamities can compare in their magnitude to having that happen while you're still a vulnerable and dependent young one. It's so big, so incomprehensible, that, for me at least, I had no idea for over forty years of just what had happened, how it had changed me, how it made me feel different from most other men.
Last night I started Maxine Harris' book, The Loss That Is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father. The title is a mouthful, but pretty much says it all. I'm thankful to Ms. Harris for her elucidation of the great discontinuity that such an event causes in a child's life--a discontinuity of magnitude and awesomeness on the order of the Grand Canyon, but that, unlike the Grand Canyon, appears all at once, without warning, and is really like a massive meteor strike on the surface of your world: If you survive the initial blast, you might not survive the ensuing degradation of your ecosystem, your loss of sustenance, your loss of light. It's like that.
Ms. Harris' book triggered a night of strange dreams for me, the most vivid of which was about me digging in a large muddy hole, pulling out large slabs of sandstone, and attempting to pull a beautiful orange boulder free from the watery mud while worrying that the water must've been coming from a plumbing leak in the house next to where I was digging. As I awoke with a racing heart, I thought about how this was very like open-heart surgery.
As dreams often do, a scene from my childhood (digging in my uncle's backyard while a hose ran) combined with mundane grownup homeowner worries and then sucker-punched me with the psychic stone, a fossilized remnant, a piece of my heart that had died and turned to stone when my father died.
My mission now is to bring the power of this event into clear view and make it a conscious part of myself, who I am--to accept it and what it has made me, even though this process feels like it could kill me. Having a young son seems to be boosting me in this direction: I can see that I need to find clarity around my dad's death and integrate it for both of our sakes. Otherwise, it will be a danger to us both.
It's like that.